How To Price Food Photography Photo Shoots Part 1 – Who Are The Clients?

In the Food Photography Club and in our Facebook group, the number one business question that comes up is, “Help! Someone wants to hire me for food photos, what do I charge them?”

Sound familiar? If you are just starting out, after all the technical stuff you have to learn with food photography, the next biggest hurdle will be how to price food photography photo shoots.

There isn’t one formula that fits all photography jobs

Here’s why pricing is so hard. There isn’t a formula for this. Sure, some food bloggers have come up with some formulas for pricing images based on social media stats and how many readers they have on their blog, but that’s totally different from what we are talking about here.

I’ve even seen some formulas that food bloggers have made based on how much you want to make for a living, plus your expenses = what you charge. That sounds good in practice. Here’s the problem with this – each type of usage in the photography world has different rates. There is no standard pricing for photography, and these formulas completely ignore the usage of the images by the clients, and the photographers end up not charging nearly enough, and are selling themselves short.

If you are a food blogger, and now a potential client is approaching you to do food photography that will not be on your blog, but will be used for advertising, you are now pricing images for commercial food photography usage, and that’s an entirely different ballgame. The pricing structure is nothing like the pricing for blog posts.

You will have two types of clients

Before we even talk about pricing and the types of jobs you could shoot, we need to talk about the types of clients you can have.

Client Direct – these are clients where you are dealing directly with the end client, like a restaurant owner, a website owner, a food manufacturer, etc.

The images above are from a client direct job – a high end grocery store.

Client direct doesn’t always mean they are a small company, but they usually are. Some large companies have a mini agency in-house to save money from hiring an ad agency, so you would be working with their creative director who has experience hiring food photographers.

However, when you are working with a small direct client, their pricing will be less than a large one, and you’ll be working with someone who is usually not a trained art director or designer, and most likely is not familiar with food photography.

Often times I get calls from small companies and they’ve never hired a photographer before. They have no idea what’s involved and often have very unrealistic expectations about costs. Most of the time, they don’t have a shot list, and some aren’t even willing to make one, so they have no idea what they want to shoot – which obviously means you can’t give them a price.

So when working with these types of clients, it takes a lot more time, a lot more teaching them how things work, and a lot of hand holding, usually for much less money.

In the beginning, you will be doing this kind of work, and it will help you to get confident to then go after the bigger clients.

I will still take these types of jobs if the client is nice to work with. If they treat me rudely from the start, I fire them right away and tell them I am not the gal for them.

Agency Work: The second type of client will be agency work. This is what I do mostly. It does pay the most as well.

The images above were shot with an ad agency in Chicago for McDonald’s.

Agency work means a few types of clients:

ad agencies that have their clients

design firms that have their clients (like for food packaging)

PR firms

social media firms

Some agencies do it all – others just specialize in one type of work. I prefer working with large client direct companies, ad agencies, and design firms. PR firms and social media firms pay the least, and these days are demanding our copyright – which I will not give up unless they pay a lot for it (which never happens).

Agencies are usually very knowledgeable in hiring food photographers, and if they aren’t that familiar with food, they fully understand hiring other types of photographers, and it just takes a little coaching to explain the nuances of shooting food to them.

These jobs pay the higher day rates because the usage tends to be much bigger – the images are going to be used all over the place instead of being printed in a magazine for a month. They will actually run ads in those magazines and other places for example.

The goal with agency work is to create images that will make their client sell lots of product, therefore making them lots of money.

To say that another way, you, the photographer are potentially going to help the client make a lot of money, and that is why your fees are compensated for that.

I can hear you salivating over there about the idea of getting paid very well for working with ad agencies. Hold your horses for a minute.

Please know that this is also the hardest type of work there is to do. The other reason why you are compensated well for this kind of shooting is that you are an expert in your field. You are technically an excellent photographer. You are known for your lighting. You also know how to do production on huge jobs. You are good with people. You can manage a crew of 10 with 5 clients on set. When a piece of equipment breaks down, you know exactly what to do without blinking an eye, and the client has no idea what just happened on set because it’s running like a beautiful, well-oiled machine.

This can be extremely stressful a lot of the time because anything can literally happen at any time, and you have to be quick on your feet to handle it, and know how to fix the problem, all while taking pictures at the same time, that the client loves.

Everyone is looking at you to run a smooth photo shoot.

Now, if you aren’t there yet, and you are offered this type of work, you just need to know the right crew to hire to help you with the production. But that’s a post for another day.

What kind of jobs are there?

Now that we know the two types of clients you can have, let’s talk about all the different types of photography jobs, and image usage you can have.

Editorial – this means images to be used by a magazine in their magazine to talk about their content – a feature story, or a filler piece. The above images are from a feature magazine shoot.

Usually the magazine will tell you their rate for the piece that you are working on. Feature stories pay more than filler pieces.

Some magazines will pay you based on how large your image will be printed in the magazine – full page, ½ page, etc. So, if you are only shooting one image for them, it might be based on this.

Many times, the magazines will tell you what they are willing to pay for the food stylist and prop stylist. So, they tell you the fee you will get, and they tell you what they pay for the food and prop stylists.

For feature stories, I’ve been paid $2500 – $3000 plus expenses and it’s up to me to determine how many days I can make that shoot happen in. They will only offer the stylists $400 or $500 for fees for the day.

I’ve actually been asked to shoot for magazines for free quite a few times. I respond with a lecture about how awful that is, and shame on them for exploiting photographers. I also say it’s not my fault they have no idea how to run their magazine so that they can pay their artists. Please see my post about why you shouldn’t shoot for free.

Then when magazines want to use images of mine that are already shot, I will license them the images using stock pricing, which I charge anywhere between $300 – $1000 – again, depending on how they are using that image, and how big it is in their magazine.

Internet Web Usage – this really has become the Wild West here. 15 years ago, there were standard web usage rates, but now companies ask for all kinds of different things with all kinds of different rates that are usually extremely low, so I probably turn down more of these types of jobs more than any other, unless it’s a bigger client through an ad agency.

The images above were done with an ad agency for the client’s website.

For pricing on web usage – when it’s client direct with a very small client, they won’t have much of a budget at all, and you need to work out your costs in order to do the job and make a profit. When it’s with a larger client, see the pricing below for advertising.

Advertising, Food Packaging, Images Used On Menu Boards, and Other Collateral – I do this type of work often, and it is usually with ad agencies and design firms. It pays more because your images are really becoming part of a brand, and again, if your food photography is beautiful, this could help the client to sell a lot of product. Day rates, or fees for this can be $3500 – $10,000 a day depending on the size of the end client, their image uses, for how long, plus expenses where you shoot 4-6 shots a day with a full crew.

Sometimes I will do a price per shot, and sometimes I will do a rate per day. If the images are extremely complex, I will probably do a fee per shot. When the images are not as complex and we are shooting lots of shots to be composited, which is the way these days, then I charge a day rate with a limit to what we shoot each day.

My next post will be all about pricing the smaller jobs when you are starting out. As you can see, there is a lot to consider for this and must be its own post.

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Christina has been shooting professionally for more than 25 years now and has specialized in shooting food for the last 15 years. She also teaches food photography with workshops and also her membership site Food Photography Club.

Hi Jo, yes indeed! it is a mind field out there with people shooting for free and people charging $10,000 a day. You just have to make sure you charge what you need to make this profitable for you and many times that will mean that the prospect will not want to pay that – which then means they are not the prospect for you.

Hi Christina, As a newbie to the food photography game, this is super helpful to start to wrap my head around pricing. It’s one of the hardest things to figure out and convince myself to feel “worthy” of asking for what you believe your work + time should be worth—especially just starting out! It’s also *really* exciting to see the range of what’s possible with bigger clients/budgets once one gains more experience, etc. Thank you so much for your informative posts and honesty—it’s so appreciated! Best, Allie

Great article! Very insightful and helpful to understanding how to navigate the nature of food photography and how to charge accordingly. I did want to ask if you have a standard template/matrix that helps you evaluate the licensing fee you would charge a client depending on the commercial platform (web, print, TV, in Store, etc) for which they would be using the images? A simple matrix would really help me get a start on having good parameters for charging depending on the use of the image. I don’t want to shortchange myself but also want to charge the client enough so they don’t think they’re paying too low (thereby thinking they’re being offered something that’s not high-quality). If you have something like this on your site (PDF, or uploaded image), I’d be happy to receive the link from you so I check it out =)

Hi Mark Henry, I do not have a pricing matrix because every job is different and there aren’t standard rates for uses either. That’s why this is so hard. So I work with the clients budget in coming up with something that works for both of us.

I love your articles and they are very helpful! I dabbled in food photography a few years ago when a friend wanted a cook book done, but since then have been out of the game and wish to get back into it again. I was wondering if you had any advice about clients that are high end hotels that need photography for their restaurants? Have you done any of these before and what would you charge say a 5* hotel that clearly has a large budget? Say they only wanted 10 photographs to use on their website and promotion packs which include a brochure? Would you charge for the day or per image? Do these types of clients usually pay for a stylist too or would they expect me to bring one/aware they need one? Thanks!

I can’t tell you what to charge. Every client and every job is different and you have to figure out what you need to charge to make a profit. You can ask them what their budget is. Just because they are a 5 start hotel does not mean they are willing to pay for food photography. I’ve been approached by huge brands who only want to pay $1000 for a job that would cost $5000 with just the expenses. Most times restaurants do not have budgets for food stylists.

Hi there! I'm Christina Peters, food photographer, teacher, and blogger. I live in LA, shoot anywhere and I love all things food. I've been shooting professionally for more than 25 years and I also teach food photography classes. I blog about photography tips and tricks. I also crave Maryland crab cakes daily. Read More…